A Lamb and a Shepherd Among Wolves

By Joseph Pearce, Crisis Magazine, May 3, 2025

Joseph Pearce is Visiting Professor of Literature at Ave Maria University and a Visiting Fellow of Thomas More College of Liberal Arts (Merrimack, New Hampshire).

Many Catholics believe, in theory, that sacrificing one’s life for another is a noble and Christian act; yet, when confronted with the reality, we often count the cost.

Editor’s Note: This is the thirty-seventh in a multi-part series on the unsung heroes of Christendom.

In the previous essay in this series, we honored Blessed Otto Neururer, the first priest to be executed by the Nazis. We also acknowledged those better-known victims of the Third Reich’s anti-Christian pogrom, St. Maximilian Kolbe and St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein). It is also fitting, however, that we should commemorate some other largely-unknown victims of Hitler’s National Socialist regime.

On August 9, 1943, on the first anniversary of the martyrdom of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross at Auschwitz, a devout Austrian Catholic, Franz Jägerstätter, was guillotined at Brandenburg-Görden Prison in Germany. The “crime” for which he was executed was being a conscientious objector who refused to be enlisted in the Wehrmacht, the army of the Third Reich. His martyrdom was the culmination of five years of passive resistance to the Nazis….

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